Abstract

This TIP adds to menu entries the ability to display both textual
labels and images (or bitmaps) in exactly the same way as buttons and
menubuttons currently can, by adding a -compound option.

Rationale

Menu entries are very similar to labels in most respects, but they
currently lack the ability to show an image and a piece of text at the
same time. It is a useful piece of functionality currently missing
from Tk (certainly many standard applications make use of such menu
entries, e.g. Internet Explorer). The changes involved are relatively
small.

Proposal

This TIP implements the change by adding an additional option
-compound to menu entries which behaves identically to Tk's
existing -compound option: it accepts the values none,
center, left, right, top, and bottom, and controls
the relative placement of an image to the text label in the entry.

A reference implementation exists, and is available from:
ftp://ftp.ucsd.edu/pub/alpha/tcl/compoundmenu.diff (note this diff has
Windows-style line endings). This implementation is known to work on
Windows and Unix, and since the changes are very, very similar on
MacOS I expect it to work there (except perhaps for simple editing
mistakes).